Now the story of Shaun Dykes broke earlier in the week and it is a signpost, a portent even, of just how disconnected we have become from reality. The story goes like this: a depressed young man goes to the top of a car park and threatens to throw himself off. The police attempt to talk him down, but all the time a crowd jeers at him, fires off expletives and urges him to do the dreaded deed. An hour later, the young man jumps and the baying crowd rush forward to video his grisly remains with ghoulish glee. The story has been nicely summed up by the BBC.
Now I’ll be the first to raise my hand to admit I’ve made some choice comments when a suicide has delayed my tube journey. “Why don’t they ever wait till it is off-peak?” and “The service isn’t that bad…!” etc. but this is beyond me. Mr Dykes friends are saying that they believe their friend could have been talked down and that the crowd are directly responsible for his death. How did we come to behave like this? I have the theory that media such as the Internet and YouTube and whatever else has totally desensitised us (or is in the process of desensitising us all, young or old, male or female). Or perhaps collecting horrific post-suicide images has become the new Top Trumps of this digital (de)generation? I don’t know. Where’s the compassion? Where’s the empathy? Where’s the reasoning?
It scares me…and now an apt pop video…